In this week’s music tech news roundup: Bitwig Studio is released to the public, Teenage Engineering’s OP1 gets a cool new operating system, Ken Macbeth shows us more of the Elements synth, organize Audio Units with Auganizer, and learn more about Roland’s Aira TR-8 drum machine.

Bitwig Studio Released!

If you’ve been following the development of Bitwig Studio over the past couple of years, you’re probably excited for this news like we are. The flexible music production platform has finally hit the retail market today and it’s looking like a game changer. The DAW lands with a price of $399 and a list of features that looks to challenge every other computer music platform on the market.

Bitwig Studio is a new and innovative music creation, recording, and performance software that supports all three major computing platforms: Windows, Mac OS X, and Linux. Combining traditional arrangement sequencing with modern performance-oriented clip launching workflows, Bitwig Studio offers a state-of-the-art audio engine under the hood, with full multi-processing support, a unified modulation system, 32/64-bit VST plugin bridging, and VST plugin crash protection.

Bitwig Studio comes with over 50 included devices. Conventional Instruments (Polysynth, FM-4, Organ, Sampler and analog-style Drum Modules) and FX (Delays, Equalizers, Compressors), as well as Container devices (to build parallel instrument or effect chains), Note FX, and Modulator devices (additional controllers like LFOs, envelope followers and step sequencers for modulating any other device). Extend this collection with your favorite VST effects and instruments, and use them side by side with BITWIG STUDIO internal devices.

OP1 OS Update

Teenage Engineering have announced a new operating system for the OP1 portable instrument. The new OS features a new synth engine called Dsynth and a new sequencer called Sketch. Dsynth offers a wide variety of sounds via an interface with dual oscillators, multitiple synthesis methods, attack / decay / filter controls, and a nice waveform visualizer.

Sketch is what T.E. calls “a hand-drawn, free shape sequencer, with no limits to pitch or quantization.” This ingenuous piece of code is an adaptation of the classic Etch-a-Sketch toy, used as a sequencing engine for the OP1′s instruments. The result is very unique to say the least.

The OP1 instrument is a powerful device that incorperates synth engines, drum engines, samples, sequencers, and a four track recording device in a very small and portable package. It’s available for $849 from Teenage Engineering as well as U.S. shops such as Noisebug and MeMe Antenna.

Macbeth Elements

In this video, Ken MacBeth introduces his latest creation, the MacBeth Elements analog synthesizer. MacBeth calls his new synthesizer a ‘no compromise synth’, inspired by classic analog synth designs. The Macbeth Elements is currently available to order.

Auganizer

Auganizer is a new OS X application that allows you to organize and arrange your Audio Unit devices in any way you choose. As the developers explain,”Auganizer lets you rename, reorder, organize and arrange your Audio Units any way you want to. Auganizer has powerful filtering and search tools within the app so you can quickly find and edit the plugins you want to rename. You can select multiple plugins to rename them all into the same top, or sub group quickly and easily, useful for organizing all your EQ or Compressors in one change.”